SIEUR DE MONTS PUBLICATIONS 



VIII 



The Acadian Forest 



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ISSUED BY 

THE WILD GARDENS OF ACADIA 
BAR HARBOR, MAINE 



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D. of D. 

NOV 30 f9i7 



SIEUR DE MONTS PUBLICATIONS 

VIII 

TPIE ACADIAN FOREST 
George B. Dorr 



The Acadian forest, using the word Acadian in its 
early French sense, stretched dense and unbroken in 
de Monts' and Champlain's time over the wide coastal 
territory now occupied by eastern Maine, by Nova 
Scotia and New Brunswick. Plundered of its wealth and 
existing- but in fragments now, no forest of a temperate 
zone clothes with more vigorous growth the land it occu- 
pies, none has greater charm or shelters a wild life more 
interesting. 

This forest is typically represented, with singular com- 
pleteness, upon Mount Desert Island, where land and 
sea conditions meet and where a unique topography 
creates a correspondingly exceptional range of woodland 
opportunity. To establish on the Island, in connection 
with its now realized national park, a permanent ex- 
hibit of this forest growing under original conditions, 
lias been from the first a constant aim with those who 
sought the park's creation. 

Such an exhibit has extraordinary value. A forest is 
far more than the mere assemblage of its trees; asso- 
ciated with them it contains, in regions of abundant 
moisture such as the Acadiau, a related life, both plant 
and animal, of infinite variety and richness, whose home 
and sheltering habitat it makes. If it perish, the plants 
that dwell beneath its shade and draw their sustenance 



in part from its clecaj^, together with the multitudinous 
other life that haunts it, largely perish with it. Such 
a forest is a wonderful complex of mutually dependent 
forms, a complex anciently established which once oblit- 
erated in a region can never be restored. It passes 
quickly, too, destroyed by axe and fire. No forest now 
exists in Europe, botanists say, that shows the early, 
natural condition of the European woodland; its very 
type is matter for conjecture. 

The typical trees of the Acadian forest, those that 
give it its peculiar character, are the northern evergreens, 
the cone-bearing pines and firs and spruces, the hem- 
locks and the arbor vitae. It is of these one thinks in 
picturing to oneself the region. Maine itself is called 
the Pine Tree State; its eastern coast, ''The Land of 
Pointed Firs." Longfellow sets the Acadian scene for 
us in Evangeline with "This is the forest primeval, 
the murmuring pines and the hemlocks," and far out 
to sea in early, long-voyaged days the approaching sailor 
welcomed with delight the pungent forest fragrance. 

But mingled with these evergreens which give the for- 
est its ]n'evailing character there are abundant other 
trees that lend their beauty to the scene. Champlain 
describes the oaks growing as in a park upon one side of 
the Penobscot River, when he ascended it in 1604, with 
pine foi-cst ou the other. Deer and bears grow fat in 
autumn on the beechnuts in the wilder woods. The two 
lujblest birch trees in Ihe world, the (Ainoe Birch, with 
its pure white ti'uuk, and the Yellow Birch, which in 
the North outstrips the oak itself in size, hud here their 
native home. Ash and niai)le are abundant. Poplars, 
mingled with Taper irirches, turn into rivers of gold 
amongst ihe somber evergreens in fall, and nowhere is 
the autuinn coloi'ing more brilliant or of richer contrast. 

Underneath tlie taller trees, wherever an even partial 
l)reak occurs, siuubs and lesser trees spring up in wide 
variety; thorns and wild plum trees, beautiful in flower 

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and fruit; luoinitain asli and elder, with red, clustered 
berries ; vil)uniunis that would grace tlie finest pleasure 
ground ; dogwoods of northern species ; sumach, beauti- 
ful at every leafy season ; blueberries in the open, rocky 
places ; wild roses by the streams and roadsides ; black- 
berries with splendid flowering stems ; witch hazel with 
its strange autumnal bloom ; rhodora, spreading out great 
sheets of pink in spring upon the peaty marshlands, min- 
gled with the fragrant labrador tea; brilliant-berried 
ilexes, sold in the cities at Christmas time for holly; and 
a host of others. 

No inch of ground, in sun or shade, is left nnoccn- 
l)ied. Tlie very rocks are lichen-clad and ferns mat over 
them in shady places. Trilliums and wild orchids bloom 
in the forest depths, with white-flowered hobble-bnshes; 
clintonias and the fragrant northern twin-flower that 
[jinnaeus loved extend themselves as in wild garden beds 
upon the woodland floor. 

Everywhere tliere is life, spreading mats of crowberry 
and the beautiful coast juniper where they are deluged 
by the ocean spray in winter storms ; clothing wind-swept 
granite heights, wherever there is crack or cranny soil 
can gather in, with partridge-berry, blueberry, and 
mountain cranberry; penetrating the forest shade and 
profiting by the dense northern covering of leafy humus 
that it fiuds there; and rich, wherever nature has not 
])een disturbed, in infinite variety — of mosses, fungus 
growths and ferns as well as flowering plants. Few 
foi-ests in the worhl, indeed, outside the rainy tropics, 
ch)the themselves with sucli al)uudnut lil'e, and there are 
noue that bi'ing one more directly into touch with natui'e, 
its wildness and its charm. 

••Wliilst ICC folloirt'd on our coarse, there came from the land odors 
imoiiilHtrdhle for sweetness, brought u-ith a icorm. u-ind so ahundanthi 
that (ill the Orient parts could not produce the like. We did stretdi nut 
our hands, as it ivcre. to take them, so palpable Kcrc tlicji. irlii<Ii I 
have admired a thousand time since." 

Marc Lescakrot. 1609. 

Purchas translation. 

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Siour (le Mouts Si)rinf; road, passing through a rare bit of rrimeval Forest 

in the national park 



